RHEL 6 Beta: Red Hat Tests Its Next Enterprise Linux

Red Hat has released the beta of its Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 6, three years after introducing version 5.

The "next generation" profits from kernel updates and improved power-saving through better process management. New monitoring tools such as Powertop and the Tuned daemon support the power management functions. Red Hat emphasizes its cooperation in kernel development, including its rewrite of the process scheduler in the kernel.

Red Hat also wants to win some points for scalability, without providing particular numbers for the beta. Apparently the limit set for RHEL 5 of 64 CPUs and 2 TBytes of memory in a rack of up to five units is no longer the case for version 6.

The major filesystem update in the beta was to ext4. XFS should also be added with the final version. NFS was updated to version 4 and thus supports IPv6. Willing testers can download RHEL 6 Beta from the Red Hat site. The final RHEL 6 should be available later this year.